Chronological Snobbery
An argument that the art, science, or thinking of an earlier time is inherently inferior to that of the present, simply by virtue of its timing priority or the belief that since civilization has advanced in certain areas, people of earlier time periods were less intelligent.
Origin
The concept was first described by Christian academic Owen Barfield in the 1920s and later popularized by his friend C.S. Lewis, who first mentioned the term in his 1955 autobiographical work Surprised by Joy. Lewis defined it as "the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited." Barfield's early friendship with Lewis at Oxford initiated intense philosophical debates that destroyed Lewis's own chronological snobbery—his uncritical acceptance of modernity's presumed superiority. The fallacy presupposes that later cultural, philosophical, or scientific ideas are necessarily superior to earlier ones simply because they are newer.